In this episode Josh was joined by special co-host Noah Tesfaye and they interviewed several organizers from Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) who have been organizing solidarity encampments this spring. This interview took place about a month ago, so the events they describe are not reflections of the most current activity on their campuses, but nonetheless this conversation is a useful look into the organizing going on in student encampments across the country.

We also hosted livestreams recently with organizers at UCLA and Cornell, as well as multiple scholars who have faced repression or arrests for their involvement with organizing on their campuses.

Thanks to Josh and Noah for hosting this conversation and to Seth Gunter for work editing this episode.

If you like the work that we do please become a patron of the show, even if just a small annual or monthly contribution. Recently we’ve had more people lowering their support or cancelling than we’ve had people signing up. So first of all just a shout-out to everyone who supports our work and makes it possible, but secondly we are trying to increase the amount of audio content we’re releasing again which has led us to expanding the number of people we’re working with as guest hosts and audio editors. And we would like to have the resources to also pay these folks for their work and continue to make some equipment upgrades. This week Noah and I will be out at a conference on the life’s work of Cedric Robinson and we hope to capture some good audio and video content while we’re out there as well that we can share with you all. Become a patron for as little as $1 a month at patreon.com/millennialsarekillingcapitalism.

SDS's National Instagram and UMN SDS's twitter.

In this episode we speak with Paul Renfro about his book Stranger Danger: Family Values, Childhood, and the American Carceral State

Paul Renfro is an associate professor of history and an affiliate faculty in the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program at Florida State University. In addition to Stranger Danger, He is also the coeditor of Growing Up America: Youth and Politics since 1945, and the author of the forthcoming book The Life and Death of Ryan White: AIDS and Inequality in America which comes out this fall on UNC Press.

Stranger Danger tells the story of how bereaved parents of missing and slain children turned their grief into a mass movement and, alongside journalists and policymakers from both major political parties, propelled a moral panic. Leveraging larger cultural fears concerning familial and national decline, these child safety crusaders warned Americans of a supposedly widespread and worsening child kidnapping threat, erroneously claiming that as many as fifty thousand American children fell victim to stranger abductions annually. The actual figure was (and remains) between one hundred and three hundred, and kidnappings perpetrated by family members and acquaintances occur far more frequently.

We get into all of that and focus intently in this conversation on how Stranger Danger functioned from its inception as a moral panic or a sex panic. A panic Renfro argues we’ve never emerged from, one that still animates the reality of mass incarceration today, but is often less discussed than other contributing factors to the largest system of carceral control and punishment in the world.

This conversation was originally recorded all the way back on September 8th and was slated to be released on Halloween to time it up with the ridiculous annual copaganda about strangers lacing children’s candy a reliable myth propelled by the child safety regime. Obviously that timeline was dramatically derailed by our focus on work around Palestine which has largely taken the form of videos on our YouTube channels. My apologies to Paul Renfro for taking so long to get this excellent conversation edited and released. Even though the conversation certainly has nothing to do with Palestine directly, as I was finalizing the edit for this episode, it was interesting to think in this moment about the demonization of student protesters, the notion that student encampments have been somehow been infiltrated by so-called “terrorists” who are poisoning their minds with radical islam, teaching them anti-semitic rhetoric, and guerrilla warfare tactics. Certainly this has many of the hallmarks of a moral panic. And there are others we discuss in the show the panic around schools teaching sex education, the dangers of drag balls, or concerns about transgender kids in sports. It is important to be able to recognize attempts to manufacture panics, and to think critically about how we respond to these multifaceted propaganda efforts.

If you want to support our work, the best way to do so is to become a patron of the show. You can do so for as little as $1 a month at patreon.com/millennialsarekillingcapitalism